It felt like this day would never come!

At last it is here!  The first day of spring!

The weather may not think so but it is here.  Flowers and sunshine can’t be too far away.  And hopefully that also means we can turn off the TV and get some exercise around here!

Now, to finish yesterday’s updates:

The fish are doing well.  We ended up losing the algae eater but the tank responded well to the Ick treatment and the rest of the  platys, tetras & catfish are doing fine.  I’ll get a new Muggle soon.

I had more to say but I forgot between making breakfast for the boys, scaring away the monster in the closet,  and getting eggs ready for dyeing later.

And now you know what the next round of pictures will be

Teacher conferences, Diseased fish, and Scarlet Fever

Yes, that says Scarlet Fever. The disease that, until earlier this evening, my only knowledge of was that it killed Beth March and in so doing traumatized me for weeks. Why did I learn more about it earlier this evening? Glad you asked. Because K’s teacher called to give me the heads up that a child in his class was taken to the ER and diagnosed with Scarlet Fever. She was calling all the parents to give them the news, in case any other kids started exhibiting symptoms. Symptoms like a high fever. And K’s temp clocked in last night and again late this afternoon at 104. My WW pic yesterday? Cute as it is, that’s K in a fever-sleep. He zonked like that while G was here.

And, oh crap, I’ve gotta get in touch with J. She was over the other day with the kiddos, before K came down with the fever.

So, me being me (worriers anonymous, anyone? Hi, I’m Maeve and I always have to think of the worst possible outcome of any situation…) I had to put in an immediate call to K’s doctor. And can I just say that I LOVE that office. I called and spoke with the after hours rep, she said a nurse would call me w/in half an hour, and it was more like half a minute. She told me what I already (on some teensy little vewy vewy quiet level waaaaaaayy deep inside) knew, which was that there are about 42 gazillion bugs going around right now and that since the ONLY thing wrong with K is the fever (seriously, he was crawling around pretending to be a dog while I was on the phone with the nurse) he’s probably FINE. She also told me that Scarlet Fever is basically a skin rash that sometimes accompanies strep throat. Some antibiotics will clear it right up. I’m to keep fluids going down K’s throat (Yay for fun rocketship shaped cups!) and keep an eye on his temp, because they will want to see him if it keeps that high for much longer. Whew.

But I do need to let J know because G seems to get everything that comes down the pike, and W is still so little. Hopefully she calls me back soon.

So moving right along, in reverse order, on to the diseased fish. I currently have 3 dead fishy corpses in baggies in my fridge, because AGAIN I got new fish and they ended up having Ich. That’s a strikeout with Mollies and now Platys. I have to swing by the pet store to get either new fish (if they’re healthy) or a refund so I can go get new fish somewhere else. I’m willing to give Platys another chance, if I can get healthy ones. I gave the Mollies about 3 or 4 goes before giving up on those. I just couldn’t keep them alive. But one of the four Platys I bought seems to be doing great. The new Muggle (a pleco) seems very happy too and the extra Neon Tetras joined right in with the couple of older ones we still had.

Yes, yes it is R’s fish tank. Why do you ask?

And finally, today was parent teacher conference day at school. I had been all kinds of conflicted about putting K into a 5 day program next year, but having talked to 1. Mrs. F who teaches the 5 day class, 2. Mrs. O who is the director of the school (the one K describes as the “Lady with the glasses what gets everyone in trouble and has a cubby full of pants in her office“), 3. Mrs. O who teaches the 4 day class I was considering switching him to instead, and 4. Mrs R. who is his teacher this year — I’ve decided that he’s best off going into the 5 day program after all. ALL of the teachers feel like it’s the better option for him. So that’s that.

The conferences themselves went VERY well. The boys are doing great and loving school. R has some issues with being a bit of a bossy control freak but we’ve been aware of that and have been working on it. His other ongoing issue is a problem with change/transitioning activities, which we are also working with him on.

Inside the mind of a five-year-old…this was an incident earlier in the year his teacher described to me:

The school does not allow kids to play games like Power Rangers and Superheroes…pretty common policy. Problem: one of R’s favorite things to do is play superhero. He likes to pretend to be heroes like “Wind Punch Boy” and “Run Fast Boy” and “Fire Fist Boy” and “Water Blast Boy”. Teacher explained the rules about not playing superheroes in school. No problem. A couple of days later, he walks into the classroom and calmly informs the teacher that he is a superhero. Teacher reminds him of the rules. His response is to tell her that he is the superhero, he’s not pretending to be one. So it’s not playing superhero, and therefore, is not against the rules. Thinking impressively fast on her feet, the teacher’s assistant tells R that “Real superheroes have to pretend to be regular people when they aren’t actually being superheroes” R totally got the logic in that one and spent the rest of the day “pretending” to be a regular kid.

Gotta love it.

So guppies aren’t cannibalistic after all…

I found out it wasn’t the other guppies who ate Jeff Wiggle back in September…it was the snails. They do a fabulous job of keeping the aquarium clean.

I found this out a few weeks ago when one of the new batch of guppies we bought died in the night. When I came down, they had already half finished it off. So I had to return HALF a fish corpse to the store to get a replacement living fish. Thank goodness for 2 week guarantees!

Oh, yeah, the fish!

For those of you who were wondering, (and you know who you are) the fish are doing okay. Two of the three from the fishing incident are still living, and we picked up a few more guppies to keep them company. Shrek and Fiona and Muggle are all happy, too, and Santa even remembered to bring them a present (a shiny new treasure chest). R and K were pretty excited about that!!

Weekend from Hell

So it’s been more like the week from Hell. Our dishwasher broke. Our washing machine broke. Our garbage disposal broke. The inspection on our car from September is not valid, because the dumbass car repair people did not tell us that we needed to bring the car back in to get the emission test redone after they replaced the cap to the gas tank. N had to work both nights of the weekend (and the days) to get a big project done so I barely saw him all weekend.

But, worst of all, was what happened with R and the fish.

Where to start with this one? N was up in the attic working. At some point in the night K woke up, came in, and got into bed with me. R did the same a short time later. Not a big deal, except that two kids in bed with me means I’m getting no sleep. One’s kicking me, one’s pulling my hair (none of it is intentional, just happening) I FINALLY drift off sometime in the wee hours. I was exhausted — this is important — I was EXHAUSTED!!!

So R wakes up at some point after I crash. And gets up, and goes downstairs. Where he sees the aquarium and thinks, hey, I’ll feed the fish. He dumps the whole can of fish food into the aquarium. Then he decides in his little 4-year-old brain that it would be fun to go fishing. Do you see where this is going? He goes fishing for our guppies. Catches them too. All 4 of them. He carries them across the living room and they eventually wind up on the floor next to the front door (we haven’t quite figured this part out). He apparently now realizes that they need water to survive, and spends the next we don’t know how long carting water from the aquarium to where the fish are now located in the fish food can, and pouring it onto the fish. Right around now, N comes down and catches him. I’m sleeping, and oddly enough, actually DREAMING about the fish. Weird, huh? So N yells at R, R cries, and this wakes me up. I come down and find the chaos. We haven’t realized at this point that he has actually removed fish from the aquarium – we think he’s just pouring water out for some reason. Moments later I realize that the guppies are missing. We actually found, and saved, three of them. One vanished completely, we have no idea where it could have ended up. Poor fishy .

I went into manic tank-cleaning mode, and N and R had a little chat about what exactly R had done. The gem from this conversation as reported to me later by N? R asking him if God was going to come down from heaven for the fish tha died. Then saying “But if God comes out of heaven, will everyone die?” N set him straight on everything.

The tank is as clean as I could get it — the water is cloudy but seems to be clearing up some. The three remaining guppies seem to be doing okay and the rest of the fish seem just fine.

So then on to today. Monday morning. R has a dentist appointment – they were filling the first 2 of his 6 cavities today. N has a HUGE project due before lunch. So I had to take off work for the AM in order to get R to his appointment. He did very well in with the dentist but he was VERY emotional coming off the anesthesia. He burst into tears all morning about everything from not being able to play a video game to having to eat soft food for lunch. I made him scrambled eggs and gave him a cup of Wawa eggnog (He’s his father’s son, they both adore the stuff) and he felt much better. Now we need to go through this two more times for the rest of his cavities.

Of Ich and Fish

The aquarium is infested. We’ve lost all the mollies except one and he’s not looking so good. We are medicating it now and crossing our fingers that we don’t end up needing to start over with it. I feel bad for the poor fish – they just look miserable.

And in other fish news, I took R trout fishing on Sunday. He loved a fishing video game at L’s house, and I thought it would be fun to go fishing for real. We went to the Grist Mill for the afternoon. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone fishing. A very, very long time.
We signed in, and the girl gave us our bait…which was a hunk of cheese. She says roll it into teeny tiny balls and the fish will go for it. So we go, and start trying to fish. The cheese didn’t roll so well…it more kind of came apart and crumbled, but I finally got some to stick on the hook. We fished for a while with no interest at all, while I explained to R that real fishing, unlike video games, takes patience. We tried a couple of different spots, until, success!! R caught his first fish!! It was really small, but there were signs everywhere saying you must keep all fish you catch. So we put it in the bag, squished some more cheese on the hook, and caught another one! R was pretty excited at this point. A few minutes go by and the fish are eating the cheese right off the hook but not getting caught when a worker comes over to check on us.
“Any luck?” she calls to us. I reply that we did catch a couple of small ones. “Oh, those are Sunnies,” she says, “you can throw those back.” “Oh. Um, well, I think maybe they are dead already…” R’s eyes get wide and he looks up at me. “The fish are DEAD, Mommy?” So I explain to him that we were fishing for the kind of fish you can eat, and he understands it, but it is hard to explain that the fish we caught were of the unedible variety but we may have killed them by mistake. Luckily one of them chose this moment to flop about a bit in the bag, so we released them and they both swam away.
The nice lady showed us a better spot to fish for trout so we moved over there. The sunnies continued to eat the cheese off our hook, but we got no interest from the trout at all. A father and son came over near us and pulled in about three or four trout in very short order. I noticed that they were using worms for bait, which apparently trout find much more appealing than cheese (silly trout!)
I asked the father if we could buy a couple of worms from them, and he was very nice and gave us a couple. In addition to that, he let R reel in the next fish he hooked, and gave it to us! R was THRILLED! We caught one more all on our own, and then started to pack up to leave. Nice man gave us another of the fish he had caught, as they had already caught more than they’d planned on.
R and I headed home with our 3 trout. I called N and said “I hope you know how to clean fish!” Which of course he didn’t!! After consulting a cookbook (useless), the internet, (slightly helpful) and J, (VERY helpful) we managed to get two of the three fish cleaned and cooked. We’ll call the third a sacrifice to the gods in charge of learning how to kill, prepare and cook your own food. Maybe gods of self reliance is less of a mouthful…

naming pets

We were away visiting L, D & I for the weekend (more about THAT hilarity later!!), and we never had a chance to see if the neighbor would drop in and feed the fish. I fed them well before we left and we kept our fingers crossed that they would be okay. When we got home, we found that Jeff Wiggle (the smallest of our four guppies) was no more. Literally no more…we found no trace of him at all in the tank. Who knew guppies were cannibals?

I took R to the pet store the other day to pick out some new fish. We had started out last year with six guppies, (all named for Wiggles characters) two catfish (Shrek and Fiona), and an algea eater (Muggle), and with Jeff’s demise we were down to three guppies along with the other three, and I wanted to get our little community back up to nine or ten fish.

Rowan picked out 3 black mollies, we got them home and after a quick replacement for one who was Ich infested, they are happily established in our tank. We’ve named one Jack (as in Sparrow), one is named Crikey in honor of Steve Irwin, and we are still trying to think of a name for the third. R keeps wanting to call it Jeff but we told him we don’t want to name it the same as the old one, and we’ll keep working on thinking up a new name.

Free Floating Snails?

Our aquarium is GREEN. Ick. It got cloudy the other day, now it’s totally green. I’m on the phone with L earlier and I notice 2 snails bobbing around in the filter-current. She’s had aquariums before so I asked her if snails are supposed to free float or if that means they are dead. We decided the snails are dead and I scooped them out and chucked them. We have too many snails anyway, I’m gonna have to do something about those. I’m going to do a massive water change on the aquarium, try to get it clear again.

Naming fish?

We have a fairly new aquarium going with some fish in it. R got it for his third birthday from his Uncle T. We have 2 emerald cory catfish, an algae eater, 6 guppies, and a few snails. Who knew that coming up with names for fish could be so much work!?

The corys were the first fish we got. Since they are green, and it’s one of R’s favorite movies, their names were fairly obvious – Shrek and Fiona. Okay good, this won’t be so bad.

After a short while we realized we would need an algae eater. One look at him, and his name, Muggle, was obvious!

The snail (one to start with, now we keep finding more) hitchhiked in on a plant. So his name was also somewhat obvious – name him after someone in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, of course! So we started out with Marvin the Snail. Now we also have Trillian, Ford Prefect, Zaphod, and Arthur.

Then we get 6 guppies. We kicked around a few ideas – I refuse to name them after other fish, so the characters from Nemo and Dorothy were right out. N suggested naming them after the characters on Friends, but I wasn’t so keen on that idea either. I thought of naming them after Harry Potter characters but we decided against that too. Finally, last night, we came to a decision! The boys like the children’s group The Wiggles, so we named them all after characters from that. Jeff, Anthony, Murray, Greg, Captain Feathersword (N insisted!) and Henry.

Yay, the fish are named!!!!